Internationals hang tough at Presidents Cup
DU BLI N, OH IO — For the International team, Friday at the Presidents Cup was a saw-off. An act of God, but no natural disaster.
A veritable monsoon, delaying play for two hours and 36 minutes, failed to defeat Muirfield Village’s fabulous drainage system, though it did prevent play from concluding in the second session of the Presidents Cup matches. But the usual landslide victory by Team USA in the alternate-shot session never came to pass.
The final tally from the six foursomes matches isn’t in, but when darkness intruded at about 7:15 p.m., each team had a lopsided win in the bag and each was leading in two matches, the overall U.S. lead remained a single point … and given recent history, that goes in the Internationals’ books as a W.
Despite a runaway performance from Phil Mickelson and Keegan Bradley, who steamrollered Canada’s Graham DeLaet and Aussie Jason Day 4&3 in the day’s leadoff match, the Americans as a team were unable to put any distance between themselves and the visitors.
Ernie Els and Brendon de Jonge laid a nearly identical beating, with the same margin, on their U.S. opponents, Hunter Mahan and Bill Haas, in the second match — and though the American duos of Steve Stricker and Jordan Spieth, and Tiger Woods and Matt Kuchar look to be in control, each 3-up in two of the unfinished games, the Internationals’ Adam Scott and Hideki Matsuyama are very much in the driver’s seat in the final match: 4-up after 11 holes on Jason Dufner and Zach Johnson.
That leaves only Angel Cabrera and Marc Leishman to try to nurse their 1-up lead on Webb Simpson and Brandt Snedeker into the house over the final five holes Saturday morning, when play was set to resume at 7:35 a.m. EDT.
The captains won’t announce their four-ball pairings until 8 a.m.
“Jason and Graham came up against probably some of the finest golf I’ve ever seen in alternate-shot with Keegan Bradley and Phil Mickelson,” said International captain Nick Price. “I think they were 9-under on their own ball which is incredible — but we are up in three matches, and I think if you consider what’s happened in the past in alternate-shot, we are certainly very happy to be in that situation.”
The bad news? More rain, maybe lots of it, is in the forecast for Sunday, and tournament director Steve Carman admitted that finishing Monday is a possibility — and if the play hasn’t concluded by sunset Monday, the team with the most points at that moment would win the Cup.
“I hope we don’t have any weather delays tomorrow, because I think everybody’s sort of getting tired now,” Price said, “and it doesn’t matter how fit these guys are. It’s just the mental impact of sitting there and drying everything off and then going back out to a wet golf course. Let’s just hope that we get 48 hours of no rain and we can finish.”
Day and DeLaet did very little wrong in the first half of their match. At the turn, they were three-under-par as a team, which in the difficult alternate-shot format is normally a terrific score.
But they were buried under a barrage of birdies, and an eagle, by Mickelson and Bradley, who shot a frontnine 30, a really absurdly good foursomes score, and the International pair found itself three holes down when the monsoon hit — and it could have been four had Mickelson holed a six-foot birdie at the ninth.
“I was worried with the way Jason Day and Graham DeLaet birdied the first two holes,” said Mickelson, “but on 5 we just turned it on and shot 30 on the front nine and made a couple more birdies on the back and it was really a fun match.”
“Reminded me of the Ryder Cup last year, just kind of getting excited and hitting a lot of great shots and never allowing them to get a hole,” said Bradley. “If they were to beat us, they were going to have to make birdie or better, and we are very difficult to beat when we do that. I think that we both really enjoy kind of showing off in front of each other. And it’s fun to hit, you know, a 270-yard hybrid to eight feet. It’s fun, whenever Phil is off the green, I half expect him to chip it in every time.”
That’s kind of how DeLaet felt, except for the fun part.
“We were 3-under through nine and 3-down. There’s not much more you can do,” he said. “We were just trying to keep giving ourselves chances and unfortunately we just were not hitting the shots. They played better than us and deserved the win.”
The rain delay didn’t seem to help or hurt either team Friday, unlike a day earlier, when a shorter break slowed what was looking like a U.S. rout, and let the Internationals regroup.
Charl Schwartzel and Louis Oosthuizen hung in there against Woods and Kuchar until Oosthuizen weakly missed a three-footer on No. 9, then hit his tee shot into the water at the par-3 12th to allow the U.S. pair to gain a stranglehold when night fell. “Seven-under through 11 was just incredible golf,” said Kuchar. “Hard to believe these guys are really giving us a great match.”
In what figures to be the pivotal remaining match of the early morning Saturday, it took 11 holes for Cabrera and Leishman to gain their first lead in it, when Simpson and Snedeker made a sloppy six at the par-five. Then Cabrera holed a 30-footer for birdie and a 2-up lead at the 12th after backing off three times, when fans kept yelling as he was about to putt.
They gave the very next hole away, though, so the task of nailing down the point and earning a 3-3 tie in the session is now that much tougher. “Angel and I, we don’t want to lose our first two matches,” said Leishman. “We do need to finish this one off, for ourselves and for the team. I think it will be really good momentum for us if we can get across the line, and there’s no reason why not.”